Mapping International Research
Infrastructures for the Humanities, Arts
and Social Sciences
A REPORT FOR THE COMMONWEALTH DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
FEBRUARY 2020

AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT
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This report has been prepared by the Australian Academy of the Humanities using multiple
sources of data. The analysis and findings are subject to the limitations of the data used.
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of that information, the Australian
Academy of the Humanities does not make any warranty, express or implied, regarding it.

ADVISORY GROUP
Professor Duncan Ivison FAHA (Chair), Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, University of
Sydney
Professor Peter Anderson, Director, National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network
Dr Marie-Louise Ayres, Director General, National Library of Australia
Anne-Marie Lansdown, Deputy CEO, Universities Australia
Dr Merran Smith, Director, Population Health Research Network
Professor Mark Western FASSA, Director, Institute for Social Science Research, University
of Queensland

PROJECT MANAGER
Dr Kylie Brass, Director Policy and Research, Australian Academy of the Humanities

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
Kylie Brass
Peter Elford
Ingrid Mason
Christina Parolin
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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

1  Executive Summary
1.1  Introduction
Australian humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) researchers are working on pressing
social and cultural challenges: from maximising the benefits of digital technologies for young
people to providing the evidence base for decisions about education, employment, public
health, and social and cultural policy.
The 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap (the Roadmap) identified the need for
national-scale infrastructure for humanities, arts and social science (HASS) research to “drive
transformations in the way researchers discover, access, curate and analyse social and cultural
data”.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities was engaged by the Department of Education to
map key international HASS research infrastructures – across humanities, arts, social
sciences and Indigenous research – to inform the development of Australian HASS national
research infrastructure (NRI).
This report outlines key findings from the international mapping and Australian gap analysis,
drawing on lessons from international investments and specifically to identify common
patterns in nationally or regionally significant research infrastructures, timeframes and
investment levels required to establish, maintain and scale up national research
infrastructures, and what may be required to collaborate and compete in data and technology-
intensive HASS research globally.
Although the research infrastructures mapped for the project may fall outside what would
traditionally be defined as ‘national research infrastructure’ as part of Australia’s National
Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program, they are nevertheless
national or pan-national scale infrastructures. This provides an opportunity to reconsider the
definition applied in Australia in terms of international comparators.
1.2  Scope
The analysis in this report is primarily informed by a detailed mapping of research
infrastructures in Europe, the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Canada and New Zealand – with
the Netherlands serving as a case-study of best-practice national approach to research
infrastructure development across the HASS community, including stakeholder organisations.
The infrastructures highlighted in the report are diverse in terms of scope, type and
organisation. The infrastructures surveyed meet a variety of research needs and development
capabilities – from large-scale, integrated and sustainable data services – including storage
and use; digitisation of printed text for analysis purposes; digital platforms for discovery;
high performance computing; interoperability across platforms and/or data sets; data
sovereignty and privacy.
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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

1.3  Key findings – International Mapping
International investments in HASS research infrastructure have shown pathways for
infrastructure investment in:
>  heritage research, data and technologies – building capabilities in characterisation
technology and pattern recognition;
>  language research, data and technologies – building capabilities in informatics,
semantics and AI; and
>  social research, data and technologies – building capabilities in internet of things,
civic technologies and precision services.
HASS national research infrastructures mapped for this project show staged investment
building on existing research practices, peer networks, investments in research and
infrastructures, and capabilities, and are heavily oriented to improving existing data assets
and processes.
The international mapping identifies the emergence of new and unique HASS research
infrastructures that are heavily data, information and computer science enabled and provide
different arrangements of data custody, new data and large scales of data that lead to radically
new research techniques.
In last ten years, international HASS research infrastructures have focused on equipping
HASS researchers with the tools and techniques to take on big data challenges. In the social
sciences, there have been major investments to align data archives, survey instruments and
methods. Humanities and arts investments have focused on experimentation, building
capacity, and platforms and digitisation technologies for cultural heritage.
In Europe, there are new large-scale text and audio-visual data collections curated and co-
located with cloud and high-performance computing at a national level. They are oriented to
enabling novel exploitation of new, curated, diverse and large data assets, utilising cloud and
peak computing facility specialists and technologies.
1.4  Key lessons – International Mapping
International mapping tells a story of what can be achieved through national research
infrastructure stimulus, indicating where Australia might seek to ‘leapfrog’ and what pitfalls
to avoid. The report identified seven broad lessons for the development of HASS NRI in
Australia:
1.  Laying the foundations: There is evidence of staged investment and pathways for
the development of infrastructure over time. Infrastructures have transitioned from
program funding to ‘landmark’ status.
2.  Capacity-building and community-building: supporting and encouraging
researchers undertaking digitally enhanced research is a fundamental part of the
process of research infrastructure development and operation.
3.  Consolidation: funding programs are moving from seeding infrastructure build to
focus on cross-cutting initiatives designed to accelerate collaboration and common
infrastructure at scale, advancing interoperability, comparative research and support
for big data research.
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4.  Fragmentation is an issue: this has been identified as an area to address in
humanities, arts and heritage, with programs funded to address the need for stronger
coordination.
5.  Balancing domain-specific and opportunities for common infrastructure
development: In Europe domain-specific development is giving way to a trend for
consolidation and common infrastructure development. Yet there are indications that
while some of the challenges will be solved by common approaches, there is still a
need for specialised, domain-specific infrastructure build.
6.  Developing complex governance models and partnerships: the strong trend
towards consolidation across the HASS research infrastructures is leading to
increasingly sophisticated governance and co-investment models.
7.  Alignment of strategies: National strategies also recognise the critical importance of
participating in, and contributing to, international and regional research
infrastructures.
1.5  Findings from the Gap Analysis
Australia does not have any nationally comparable HASS research infrastructures, and this
represents a significant gap in national research capacity. Consequently, research data assets
currently enabling HASS research either do not exist in Australia, or are institutionally hosted
and uncoordinated, and largely not FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
Patterns in the Australian landscape look like the pre-stimulus phase in Europe in which
Framework Program funding seeded key HASS strengths. Australia has made some
investments via ANDS/NeCTAR/RDS and through the Australian Research Council’s
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities scheme and there are Australian
comparators to many of the European research infrastructures operating at an institutional
level that are well placed to be evolved into national capabilities.
Much of Australia’s public sector data – both social and cultural – is locked up and/or
underutilised in HASS research, and in other disciplines. It is clear from the mapping survey
that in Europe many of the cross-government jurisdiction challenges that are typical of the
Australian federation have been addressed through formal Memoranda of Understanding
(MoUs) and EU incentives (fiscal and regulatory).
1.6  Models to consider for HASS scoping study
The report suggests seven key national-scale infrastructures warrant further analysis to
address gaps in Australian national research infrastructure, as part of a HASS scoping study.
These include:
1.  IMPACT Centre of Competence, providing state-of-the-art tools, services and
facilities in document imaging, language technology and the processing of historical
text.
2.  Europeana, Europe’s digital platform for cultural heritage.
3.  SAIL Databank – providing robust secure storage and use of anonymised person-
based data for research to improve health, well-being and services.
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4.  CLOSER, hosting longitudinal research and brings together eight world-leading social
longitudinal studies.
5.  HathiTrust, digitisation, text and data mining services.
6.  CLARIAH, providing access to large collections of digital data and to innovative
applications for the processing of data.
7.  ODISSEI, a platform for the survey and collection of social science data, designed to
draw the efforts of research more closely to feeding into social policy directions and
outcomes.
1.7  Potential pathways and priorities for Australia
Australia is in a position to plan out the HASS NRI ecosystem based on the lessons identified
in this international mapping report. The following priorities for Australia have emerged from
the mapping and gap analysis:
1.  Given the strong trend internationally towards consolidation across the HASS research
infrastructures, Australia should consider a coordinating entity to create focus, clarify
responsibility and reduce complexity for the development of requirements and roadmaps
for Australian HASS research infrastructures.
2.  Adopt a portfolio approach to program and infrastructure delivery to foster the capacity
and capabilities of the Australian HASS sector over the next decade:
a.  Deliver a HASS Research Data Commons
b.  Establish a Social Science and Language Data Hub
c.  Develop an Indigenous Data Framework
d.  Establish a National Digitisation Capability
e.  Develop a Digital HASS Peak capability

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2  International HASS Research Infrastructures
2.1  Introduction
Internationally, governments have recognised both the potential and need for intensive digital
research infrastructure for humanities, arts and social science researchers for almost two
decades. The mapping undertaken for this project sought to identify key international
infrastructures to inform Australia’s planning for HASS research infrastructure. The aims of
the project were twofold: to provide evidence-based advice on the scale and impact of public
investment in international HASS research infrastructure; and an understanding of the
structure and approaches to international HASS research infrastructure.
The analysis in this report is primarily informed by a detailed mapping of research
infrastructures in Europe, the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Canada and New Zealand. A range
of infrastructure stimuli have enabled research fields to build capability via targeted calls,
such as though successive European Framework programs. Europe, Canada, and the
Netherlands have also engaged in strategic roadmapping exercises, which have scoped HASS
capabilities, and the UK is currently undergoing the first strategic national roadmapping of its
own – which includes HASS.
An in-depth case-study of the approach to HASS research infrastructure development in the
Netherlands is provided as an exemplar of a national approach to investment.
2.2  International HASS infrastructures selected
Exemplar infrastructures in these jurisdictions were identified with the assistance of a project
Advisory Group – experts drawn from key stakeholder communities – HASS research,
Indigenous research, the cultural and collecting sector, and universities.
The project adopted a broad definition used by the European Strategy Forum on Research
Infrastructures (ESFRI) and the EU Framework Program:
Facilities, resources and services that are used by the research and innovation
communities to conduct research and foster innovation in their fields. They
include: major scientific equipment (or sets of instruments), knowledge-based
resources such as collections, archives and scientific data, e-infrastructures, such
as data and computing systems and communication networks and any other tools
that are essential to achieve excellence in research and innovation.
The project was also informed by the UK’s first national roadmapping exercise (in progress)
which takes an ‘ecosystem’ view to scope the broadest range of ‘research and innovation’
infrastructure.

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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

The research infrastructures mapped for the project may fall outside what would traditionally
be in scope as part of Australia’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy
(NCRIS) program. Infrastructure development in HASS, specifically the question of whether
to develop existing infrastructures or build new capability, will require strategic investment
decisions from a range of organisations including the government.
The infrastructures selected for analysis span ‘humanities, arts and social sciences’ domains;
‘heritage’ infrastructures which have successfully brought together research and cultural
institutions; and ‘Indigenous’ research infrastructures.
Some of infrastructures mapped for this study are relatively small, institutionally based
programs, others are pan-European landmark efforts. The mapping and gap analysis were
carried out contiguously with the Advisory Group asked to identify key areas of Australia’s
strengths, gaps and prospects at the outset of the project. The mapping work was not intended
to be comprehensive; it was necessarily selective.
2.2.1.  Humanities & Arts/ Heritage
>  CLARIN – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (Pan-
national/ European)
>  DARIAH – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (Pan-national/
European)
>  CLARIAH – Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
(Netherlands)
>  EU E-RIHS – European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (Pan-national/
European)
>  Europeana (Pan-national/ European)
>  Impact Centre of Competence (Digitisation) (Pan-national/ European)
>  HathiTrust (USA)
2.2.2. Social Sciences

>  CLOSER – Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (Pan-national/
European)
>  CESSDA Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (Pan-national/
European)
>  ESS – European Social Science Survey (Pan-national/ European)
>  SAIL Databank (Pan-national/ European)
>  SHARE – Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (Pan-national/
European)
>  ODDISEI – Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations
(Netherlands)

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2.2.3  Indigenous

>  FNIGC – First Nations Information Governance Centre (Canada)
>  Te Mana Raraunga – Māori Data Sovereignty Network (New Zealand)
2.2.4  HPC Facility

>  Compute Canada (Canada)
2.3  Selection rationale
All the infrastructures selected for this mapping exercise are focussed on transforming access
to and analysis of cultural and social data for research (Table 1).
The work we have undertaken in this report ranges over infrastructures with very different
funding sources and involves a range of government stakeholder departments and agencies.
We have sought to understand how other jurisdictions have solved problems relating to:
>  Building relationships and partnerships across sectors
>  Enabling research access to government data
>  Bringing together of cultural and research infrastructures to achieve efficiencies for
respective stakeholders, particularly around digitisation challenges
>  Timing, staging and scale of investments – specifically, whether capability should
lead investment, or whether investment should build capability.
>  The types of investment (is it institutional, program funding, or strategic?) to best
meet research needs and achieve impact.
>  Working towards solutions for sensitive data storage and access.
The infrastructures mapped are diverse in terms of scope, type and organisation. Selections
were based on success in terms of longevity (indicating recurrent funding based on evidence
of impact) and meeting research needs of the respective domain communities.
The infrastructures surveyed meet a variety of research needs and development capabilities –
from large-scale, integrated and sustainable data services – including storage and use;
digitisation of printed text for analysis purposes; digital platforms for discovery; high
performance computing; interoperability across platforms and/or data sets; data sovereignty
and privacy.
All infrastructures are operational and well-established. The only infrastructures listed as not
being at the operational phase is the new large-scale European Research Infrastructure for
Heritage Science (EU E-RIHS) heritage science program.

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Table 1: International infrastructures mapped for this project – at a glance

Domains  Research
Scope
Infrastructure type
Start
Duration  Investment
Infrastructure
Social  European
A research-driven cross-national survey measuring the attitudes,
Archive or repository
2002
16-20
$16-20M
Sciences  Social Survey
beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations of Europe
Data service
Years
(ESS)
across more than thirty nations. Conducted across Europe since its
Discovery platform
establishment in 2001. Through the participating countries, ESS
Capability building
operates as a pan-national data discovery service. Targeted at
Community building
survey methodology and interoperability of data infrastructure to
Information sources
support comparative analysis.
Research practices and
http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/about/
methods
Research tools/ platforms
  Survey of
A multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data  Archive or repository
2004
11-15
$21-50M
Health, Ageing  on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of
Data service
Years
and
about 140,000 individuals aged 50 or older (around 380,000
Discovery platform
Retirement in
interviews). Covers 27 European countries and Israel. Pan-national
Capability building
Europe
cooperation around survey methods and data col ection of ageing
Community building
(SHARE)
populations in Europe. Support for cross-cutting infrastructure to
Information sources
advance interoperability, comparative research and support for big  Research practices/ methods
data research.
Research tools/ platforms
http://www.share-project.org/home0.html
  Consortium of
Provides large-scale, integrated and sustainable data services to the  Archive or repository
2006
11-15
$101-150M
European
social sciences. It brings together social science data archives across  Data service,
Years
Social Science
Europe, with the aim of promoting the results of social science
Discovery platform
Data Archives
research and supporting national and international research and
Capability building
(CESSDA)
cooperation.
Community building
https://www.cessda.eu/About
Research practices and
met

hods
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Social  SAIL Databank
SAIL (Secure Anonymised Information Linkage) provides secure
Archive or repository
2007
11-15
$21-50M
Sciences
access to demographic, health, social and education data from the
Data service
Years
resident population of Wales – a flagship for the robust secure
Discovery platform
storage and use of anonymised person-based data for research to
Capability building
improve health, well-being and services. Now powered by the UK
Community building
Secure e-Research Platform (UKSeRP).
Software service
https://saildatabank.com/about-us/overview/
Information sources
Research practices and
methods
HPC service
Cloud storage/compute
Research tools/ platforms
  Cohort and
Hosts longitudinal research, brings together eight world-leading
Archive or repository
2012
6-10
$11-15M
Longitudinal
longitudinal studies with participants born throughout the 20th and  Data service
Years
Studies
21st centuries. Its work maximises the use, value and impact of
Discovery platform
Enhancement
these, and other, longitudinal studies to help improve
Capability building
Resources
understanding of key social and biomedical chal enges.
Community building
(CLOSER)
https://www.closer.ac.uk/home/what-we-do/
Information sources
Research practices and
methods
Research libraries

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Humanities  Common
Provides access to digital language resources for researchers,
Archive or repository
2006
11-15
$16-20M
& Arts  Language
students, and citizen-scientists, especial y in the humanities and
Data service
Years
Resources and  social sciences, through single sign-on access. Offers solutions and
Discovery platform
Technology
technology services for deploying, connecting, analysing and
Capability building
Infrastructure
sustaining digital language data and tools. Enables advanced
Community building
(CLARIN)
analytics and new types of services and technologies. Links
Information sources
between heritage and language infrastructures, and new industries.  Research practices and
https://www.clarin.eu/content/vision-and-strategy
methods
Research tools/ platforms
Language data and tools
  Digital
Enhances and supports digital y enabled research and teaching
Discovery platform
2006
11-15
$11-15M
Research
across the arts and humanities. DARIAH is a network of researchers,  Capability building
Years
Infrastructure
expertise, information, knowledge, content, methods, tools and
Community building
for the Arts
technologies from its member countries. It develops, maintains and  Information sources
and
operates an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research
Research practices and
Humanities
practices and sustains researchers in using them to build, analyse
methods
(DARIAH)
and interpret digital resources.
Research libraries
https://www.dariah.eu/about/dariah-in-nutshel /
Research tools and platforms
  Common Lab
CLARIAH is a distributed infrastructure for the humanities and social  Discovery platform
2012-
12
$42.3M
Research
sciences. It builds on various infrastructure and research projects
Capability building
2024   Years
Infrastructure
carried out both nationally and internationally. Its focus areas are
Community building
for the Arts
linguistics, social and economic history media studies, and text.
Information sources
and
These areas function as  precursors for other disciplines and
Research practices and
Humanities
together comprise al  forms of data: text, image, audio-visual
methods
(CLARIAH)
material and structured data (databases).
Research libraries
https://www.clariah.nl/en/
Research tools and platforms
Research pilots
Dissemination
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Heritage  IMPACT Centre  A not for profit organisation with the mission to make the
Discovery platform
2008
11-15
$21-50M
of Competence   digitisation of historical printed text “better, faster, cheaper”. It
Capability building
Years
provides tools, services and facilities to further advance the state-
Community building
of-the-art in the field of document imaging, language technology
Software service
and the processing of historical text.
Information sources
https://www.digitisation.eu/
Digitisation service
  Europeana
Europe’s digital platform for cultural heritage, Europeana is an
Data service
2008
11-15
$101-150M
exemplar in the advancement of cultural heritage interoperability.
Discovery platform
Years
An aggregator service, and heavily supported by the European
Capability building
Library, a hub of 48 national and research libraries in Europe. It is
Community building
one of the European Commission’s Digital Service Infrastructures
Software service
(DSI). “As a DSI, Europeana’s objectives are to innovate the
Information sources
aggregation infrastructure, boost the distribution infrastructure and  Research tools and platforms
work towards long-term financial stability through business model
innovation. Al  of this helps make sure that Europe’s businesses and
people reap the ful  benefits of the technological revolution in
digital services in culture.”
https://pro.europeana.eu/our-mission/history
  HathiTrust
Text and data mining infrastructure partnership of academic and
Archive or repository
2008
11-15
Co-
research institutions, offering a col ection of mil ions of titles
Data service
Years
investment
digitised from libraries around the world. Capacity for digitisation,
Discovery platform
through
text and data mining services to be shared across academic
Capability building
membership
libraries.
Community building
and
https://www.hathitrust.org/
Software/ Information
investment
Research practices and
through
methods
Google deal
Research libraries
undisclosed
Digitisation service
Cloud storage/compute
Research tools/ platforms
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  European
In pre-operational phase. Aims to deliver integrated access to
Discovery platform
2016
3-5 Years  $6-10M
Research
expertise, data and technologies through four platforms (heritage
Capability building
Infrastructure
interpretation, preservation, documentation and management) to
Community building
for Heritage
support heritage science. Mission to deliver integrated access to
Information sources
Science (E-
expertise, data and technologies through a standardized,
Research practices and
RIHS)
coordinated approach. http://www.e-rihs.eu/
methods
Digitisation service
Research tools and platforms
Indigenous  First Nations
Supports data sovereignty and the development of information
Data service
2010
6-10
No national
Information
governance and management at the community level through
Discovery platform
Years
policy driven
Governance
regional and national partnerships. Focused surveys and data
Capability building
investment,
Centre
capture for a range of health and wellbeing objectives where they
Community building
survey
impact on First Nations peoples in Canada. It adheres to free, prior
Information sources
project
and informed consent, respects nation-to-nation relationships, and  Research practices and
funding.
recognises the distinct customs of nations.
methods
https://fnigc.ca/about-fnigc/mission.html
  Te Mana
Established to advocate for Māori rights and interests in data to be
Capability building
2015
3-5 Years  No national
Raraunga -
protected as the world moves into an increasingly open data
Community building
policy driven
Māori Data
environment”
Information sources
investment,
Sovereignty
https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/
short-term
Network
research
project
funding.
  Compute
Provides essential ARC services and infrastructure for Canadian
Capability building
2016
3-5 Years  $3-5M
HPC  Canada
researchers and their col aborators in al  academic and industrial
HPC service
sectors. Specific support for humanities and social sciences built
Cloud storage/compute
into existing national computational services.
service
https://www.computecanada.ca/about/
Local storage
Research tools and platforms
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2.3  National profile: The Netherlands
The Netherlands offers an instructive national model for Australia. Although the Netherlands
and Australia are not direct comparators in terms of size, there are factors that make the
Netherlands a useful template for Australia.
The Dutch national research infrastructure roadmap (2016-2020) developed by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) includes two new entries:
CLARIAH (Common Lab Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities – which brings together
CLARIN and DARIAH) and ODISSEI, a data facility, observatory, laboratory and hub led by
CBS (national statistics agency), SURFSara (NREN), CentERdata (data archive,
institutionally based), NWO (national research infrastructure funder) – with 30 participating
organisations.
These large-scale infrastructures are intended to meet the needs of humanities and arts, and
social science researchers (respectively). In the Netherlands, there is a drive to strengthen and
integrate national social science and humanities research infrastructure. In the broader EU
context, a Social Science and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) (as part of the European
Open Science Cloud initiative) is in development and NWO collaborates internationally and
is connected into European research infrastructures, research programs, peer networks and
joint programing initiatives.
The national profile for the Netherlands indicates EU subsidies operating prior to HASS
research infrastructure investment appearing on the NWO national research infrastructure
roadmap; and identifies Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) – a data archiving
service provider for researchers in the Netherlands – support for HASS (within the national
landscape) as a coordinator of EU subsidy and provider of social science data infrastructure
services.
Analysis of Dutch spending on digital infrastructure (enabling research) indicates sizeable
EU investments, that are leveraged and over time increased structural spending nationally to:
include two new HASS research infrastructures the national roadmap and investment plan,
and to fund DANS as critical part of that agenda. NWO allocated funds to support existing
HASS research practices in two funding streams (as innovation programs) in 2015 and 2016,
as funding for HASS, once the EU subsidies wane.
By 2017 more national investment was required to sustain digital research infrastructure for a
much wider array of research domains with funding from both NWO and the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). DANS played a key role in drawing in
and managing EU research infrastructure funds for HASS research and
common/interoperability research and data infrastructures (nationally, regionally, and
internationally). The expenditure for the Netherlands from 2012-2024 on HASS research
infrastructure equates to: 73.1M AUD (42.3M CLARIAH + 30.8M ODISSEI) (Table 3).

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Table 3: The Netherlands investment in HASS research infrastructure 2012-2024
CLARIAH – humanities and arts
ODISSEI – social sciences
DANS – humanities and social
sciences support
Total: 2012-2024 (12 years)
Total: 2016-2024 (8 years)
Total: 2012-2019 (8 years)
@42.3M AUD
@30.8M AUD
@60M AUD
2012-2014, 1M Euro (1.6M AUD)
2016, 0.5M Euro (0.8M AUD)
2012 ongoing ~4.5M pa, 36M
Euro (60M AUD)
2015-2018, 12M Euro (17.8M AUD)    2019, 18M Euro (30M AUD)
[2012-2015 ~4.5M Euro pa, 18M
2019-2024, 13.8M Euro (22.9M
Euro, 2017 5.2M Euro pa, 2018
AUD)
4.9M Euro pa]*
* See KNAW annual reports for DANS annual funding: https://www.nidi.knaw.nl/en/about/documenst
2.3.1.  Humanities & Arts/ Heritage
The Netherlands plays an important regional role in Europe as the lead for CLARIAH. The
Netherlands has developed innovative partnerships and governance models (national and
global nodes) to facilitate a research infrastructure ecosystem which achieves regional impact
through a combination of institutional centres of excellence, government linkages, and cross-
cutting investments.
The key infrastructures supported in the Netherlands are CLARIN, DARIAH, CLARIAH,
Europeana, Time Machines, DASISH (Data Service Infrastructure for the Social Sciences
and Humanities – a cluster project that brings together all five ESFRI research
infrastructures), the National Library of the Netherlands’ KB Lab, and the eScience Center
(clustered in association with CLARIAH-PLUS).
The National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), participates in
Europeana projects, and has developed services specifically for digital humanities research.
CLARIAH provides datalegend, a structured data service. Time Machines in Amsterdam and
Utrecht are exemplars of institutional centres of competence and national networks required
to enable humanities and arts research based on common data infrastructure, i.e. linked open
data, technologies, and expertise, digitised historical heritage materials (2D and 3D). Local
Time Machines also operate as part of a European wide Time Machine initiative.
National networks include DEN (Dutch national knowledge institute for culture and
digitalisation and a national digital heritage strategy) and CLARIAH.
CLARIAH centres in the Netherlands are: DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services),
International Institute of Social History, Dutch Language Institute, National Library of the
Netherlands, Huygens ING, Meertens Institute, Max-Plank Institute, Netherlands Institute for
Sound and Vision. The CLARIAH network includes Austria and Germany (where the
consolidation of infrastructures has also occurred) and connected into a national eHumanities
platform.
eHumanities.nl is the national platform and has partnerships with research platforms,
universities, cultural institutions around expertise, research, technology, and collections.
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The Netherlands features cross-sector and cross-institutional partnerships via the Centre for
Digital Humanities – a partnership between Amsterdam and VU University, and the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), with support from the Netherlands
eScience Center.
A major success factor for the Netherlands is the coordination and integration of research
data and technologies with knowledge infrastructures across higher education and heritage to
support humanities and arts research. This involves national data centres e.g. National
Library and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision as a critical strategic partnership
along with centres of competence in higher education e.g. Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Meertens Institute, Institute for Dutch Lexicology, Data Archiving and
Networked Services (DANS) and Huygens ING.
The National Library of the Netherlands is a partner in Impact Centre of Competence on
digitisation. As part of CLARIAH-CORE proposal, major cultural heritage institutions will
provide their collections as digitised resources and are referred to as “national data centres”.
2.3.2. Social Sciences
Over time there has been cross-sector stakeholder investment around establishing large scale
infrastructure building upon existing institution and national capacity in the survey and
collection of social science data, and as a national node for global collaboration. Building on
institutional competencies and long-term commitments in pan-national and global initiatives
in social surveys and data archiving.
The collaboration around surveys commenced very early on within Europe and in global
spheres (2002). Stakeholder relationships at the national level were formed through
collaborative survey data collection (longitudinal) and then in the establishment of national
data infrastructure and more recently the large-scale platform (ODISSEI).
ODISSEI builds upon a pre-existing consortium of multiple research organisations from
across the university and public sector. The major aim of that consortium (and ODISSEI) is
to increase infrastructure system efficiencies (reduce fragmentation and overlap) and
coordinate effort. Australian equivalents of this infrastructure in universities are the
Australian Data Archive (ADA), based at the Australian National University, and
longitudinal surveys and datasets such as Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in
Australia (HILDA) Survey. Public federal research agency equivalents would be the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW),
and departments of Social Services and Education.
A shared aim in ODISSEI that operates across jurisdictions in the Netherlands is to draw the
efforts of research more closely to feeding into social policy directions and outcomes. From a
practices perspective the coordination of effort is designed to leverage more effectively the
data and expertise in that community and share common infrastructure such as surveys and
panels.

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2.4  Findings
2.4.1.  Investment approaches and timeframes
There are broadly two investment approaches internationally and evidence of a balance
between:
1.  Augmentation: building upon existing capacity and research practices, in which
research domains and capability levels have matured to the point where they drive the
need for collaborative infrastructure; and
2.  Transformation: building new capacity and establishing new research practices --
more visionary, future-focused infrastructures which are achieved through strategic
investments.
HASS national research infrastructures mapped for this project show staged investment,
particularly in Europe, over the last two decades. In the main those changes have been
widespread and small to medium scale investments in data infrastructure and research
technologies, for example European Social Survey (ESS) (established in 2002), Survey of
Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) (2004), and Common Language
Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) (2004).
These investments, dating back 15 to 20 years, build on existing research practices, peer
networks, investments in research and infrastructures, and capabilities, and are heavily
oriented to improving existing data assets and processes. Complementary and relevant
research technologies, information and expertise, to maintain and extend research skills are
provided, and increase researchers’ capacity to take up new research techniques.
In the last ten years, international HASS research infrastructures have focused on equipping
HASS researchers with the tools and techniques to take on big data challenges.
In the social sciences, there have been major investments to align data archives, survey
instruments and methods. This is evident in the cooperative relationships between CESSDA
with other infrastructure projects e.g. SSHOC and SERISS and other social science-related
infrastructures e.g. ESS and SHARE.
Humanities and arts investments have focused on experimentation, building capacity, and
platforms and digitisation technologies for cultural heritage. In Europe, there are new large-
scale text and audio-visual data collections curated and co-located with cloud and high-
performance computing at a national level. These larger scale infrastructures operate on two
dimensions: platforms for use by many in the cloud, and platforms connected to peak
facilities for highly specialised research. They are oriented to enabling novel exploitation of
new, curated, diverse and large data assets, utilising cloud and peak computing facility
specialists and technologies.
There is evidence of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches to development. A range of
infrastructure stimuli have enabled research fields to build capability via targeted calls, such
as through successive European Framework programs. Europe, Canada, and the Netherlands
have engaged in strategic roadmapping exercises, which have scoped HASS capabilities. The
UK is currently undergoing the first strategic national roadmapping of its own, which
includes a map for the ‘social sciences, arts and humanities’ sector.
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2.4.2.  Organisational structure
Very few research infrastructures examined through this mapping exercise operate as a
shared facility with a centralising role. All infrastructures are of necessity operating in multi-
stakeholder networks and they are supported by institutional centres of competence as key
partners that provide support, and in most cases critical enabling expertise and infrastructure.
The research infrastructures included in the mapping survey are mostly distributed ‘expert
networks’ composed of institutional competence and institutional infrastructures, coordinated
by an entity that represents their collective, often national or European, interests. HASS
infrastructures therefore tend to place a greater emphasis on community and capability
building. To that extent, they can be said to be distinct from research infrastructures serving
the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) sector tend to be more
single-sited, compared with those in the HASS sector.
2.4.3.  Partnerships
For new types of HASS research to be enabled, data needs to be unlocked, coordinated, and
curated at much larger scales in new data sourcing arrangements and co-developed
infrastructure partnerships with government organisations or industry.
In Europe, critical stakeholder relationships around researchers’ access to data have been
effectively negotiated over time. For example, the Europeana and IMPACT cultural data
infrastructure programs operate in a parallel stream to that of European research
infrastructure.
Recent funding partnerships and investments of interest to this exercise are:
>  DARIAH and CLARIN programs spent two years (2016-2017) liaising with LIBER
(the European Research Libraries) to establish a memorandum of understanding. It is
on that basis, that the partners and members that constitute DARIAH assert: “We
bring the world of cultural data with us” to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)
initiative.
>  DARIAH and CLARIN partners and members, and collaborators have a place within
the EOSC funded Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud program (SSHOC) –
and – on the E-RIHS (an emerging ERIC).
>  CESSDA has MoU in place with other ERIC social science research infrastructures,
and in 2017 tackled a “strengthening and widening” activity and reported on the state-
of-the-art, obstacles, models and roadmaps for widening the data perimeter of the data
services, through planning and engagement (see also their role in the RAIRD project
for access to register data). The expected outcome being to “address new data sources
and new actors” including statistics agencies and producers of web, transactional,
administrative and historical data and to establish “establish agreements with other
institutions/organizations and data producers in order to keep up with researchers’
needs, which change over time”.

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2.4.4.  Trends and emerging priorities
Internationally, new HASS national research infrastructures have been created in the last
decade, and this has affected a kind of HASS research ‘disruption’. In the main those
investments have been focused on developing entirely new types of infrastructure cloud
computing and platforms and large-scale types of research infrastructure.
The new HASS research infrastructures enable entirely new research practices to be fostered,
and they require new peer networks to be created in the infrastructure design and research
pilots (informing those designs). New investments are directed toward constructing new data
infrastructure, i.e. new types of data are drawn together (administrative, social media, and
digital heritage) with cloud and high-performance computing infrastructures.
These infrastructures are oriented to enabling novel exploitation from new curated, diverse
and large data assets, utilising cloud and peak computing facility specialists and technologies,
the skills and research interests of data, information and computer scientists.
These types of HASS research infrastructures afford the capacity to tackle research, that
currently it is not possible to undertake without that scale of infrastructure or investment. Key
success factors in their development is balancing the HASS research requirements driving the
design, and the data/information/computer scientists, operating as both infrastructure
designers and research enabling partners.
The emergence of new and unique humanities research infrastructures is evident in the Time
Machine initiatives in Europe (below), the ‘Living With Machines’ initiative in the UK, the
HathiTrust in the USA, and global collaboration around digitised cultural heritage materials
maintained by large national research and heritage libraries e.g. Global Dataset of Digitised
Texts Network (GDD Network) (Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2019).
In the case of the GDD Network, the fact that the UK has a separate research council for arts
and humanities research has enabled strategic investment in domain-specific infrastructure.
The GDD Network is funded by the AHRC, led by the University of Glasgow, in close
collaboration with the HathiTrust, based in the USA, and involves key library partners as
follows: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, and
Research Libraries UK (RLUK).
The AHRC is also leading the development of the ‘Living with Machines’ project, which is a
collaboration between the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, together with
researchers from a range of universities. Funding of £9.2 million has been awarded from the
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund for the infrastructure initiative
which “will take place over five years and is set to be one of the biggest and most ambitious
humanities and science research initiatives ever to launch in the UK” (Alan Turing Institute,
2019).
In Europe, a pattern is emerging of new large-scale text and audio-visual data collections
curated and co-located with cloud and high-performance computing at a national level. e.g.
Denmark’s Cultural Heritage Cluster – a collaboration between DeIC (Danish e-
Infrastructure Cooperation) and the Royal Danish Library. These larger scale infrastructures
operate on two levels: platforms for use by many in the cloud, and platforms connected to
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peak facility for highly specialised research. Australia is missing this national domain
focused capability to support HASS research.
2.5  Lessons
International mapping tells a story of what can be achieved through national research
infrastructure stimulus, indicating where Australia might seek to ‘leapfrog’ and what pitfalls
to avoid.
Key lessons for Australia are in Table 4, which also includes potential priorities and identifies
comparative Australian infrastructures (at project, program or institutional level). Overall, the
following patterns have emerged from the research and are significant for Australia:
1.  Laying the foundations. There is evidence of staged investment and pathways for the
development of infrastructure over time. Infrastructures have transitioned from
program funding to ‘landmark’ status. For example, DARIAH, which was funded in
2006 through the European Strategy Framework for Research Infrastructure (ESFRI)
and reached European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status in 2014. In
the social sciences, longitudinal survey infrastructure has developed over decades, and
is now undergoing further transformation through possibilities offered by technology,
compute, and data linkage.
2.  Capacity-building and community-building is a fundamental part of the process.
For example, DARIAH’s national approach to boosting support for arts and
humanities in a regional network (member and partner organisations) and strong
programs for community building and coordination (ground up first).
3.  In Europe, infrastructure stimulus programs (Framework Program funding have
seeded infrastructure build and are now focusing (via Horizon 2020) on cross-cutting
initiatives designed to accelerate collaboration and common infrastructure at scale.
For example, the cross-cutting program Synergies for Europe’s Research
Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS), which brings together ESS, SHARE,
CESSDA, among others to advance interoperability, comparative research and
support for big data research.
4.  Fragmentation in infrastructure investment has been identified as an area to
address in humanities, arts and heritage. Two Horizon 2020 programs have been
funded to address the need for stronger coordination: PARTHENOS (cross-cutting to
improve data practices across programs); and E-RIHS-PP (ESFRI-funded).
5.  Balancing domain-specific and opportunities for common infrastructure
development. In Europe domain-specific development is giving way to a trend for
consolidation and common infrastructure development. The alignment of CLARIN
and DARIAH as CLARIAH is one example of this trend, as is the new Social Science
and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC), which is part of the general shift in data and
technology intensive research to using cloud infrastructure and working in virtual
environments. There are indications in the new SSHOC that while some of the
challenges will be solved by common approaches, there is still a need for specialised,
domain-specific infrastructure build. The lesson for Australia is that the planning for
this should happen at the outset of NRI development. There is an opportunity to
ensure the HASS, Indigenous and Heritage domains can be brought together as part of
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the planning for a comprehensive assessment of common needs and to identify where
specialist infrastructure will be required.
This type of infrastructure development work could align with the strategic policy
agenda in Australia (through the Australian Research Data Commons) for stronger
research data management for data enabled and driven research, improvements in the
production and reuse of quality research data and software assets, and the
development of domain oriented virtual environments, and cloud enabled
infrastructures.
6.  Developing complex governance models and partnerships to align the needs of
different sectors. Across Europe there is a strong trend towards consolidation across
the HASS research infrastructures, leading to increasingly sophisticated governance
and co-investment models. Significant effort has been invested in EU legislation to
address data privacy and data rights. There has been a focus also on aligning
culture/heritage and research infrastructure. The IMPACT Centre of Competence is
an exemplar of aligning investments in digitisation to meet the needs of European
culture and society and to meet the needs of research (access to heritage data), and
also the capacity to leverage collaborative networks and consolidate investments (for
both sectors and institutional members).
7.  National strategies also recognise the critical importance of participating in, and
contributing to, international and regional research infrastructures. Here the
Netherlands is particularly instructive. The CLARIAH network, includes Austria and
Germany (where the consolidation of infrastructures has also occurred) and connected
into a national eHumanities platform. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO) collaborates with CESSDA, ESS, SHARE as part of the
internationalisation of social sciences.

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Table 4: Key lessons for Australia from the International mapping
Research Infrastructure  Lessons
Trends and priorties for Australia
European Social Survey  At a national level through the participating countries, ESS operates as
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
(ESS)
a pan-national data discovery service. Targeted at survey methodology  data hub to provide national focus for identifying and facilitating

and interoperability of data infrastructure to support comparative
access to government datasets for research.
analysis (closer to the research process).
Australian comparators include: Longitudinal datasets e.g. HILDA,
The impact of different funding levels across time as the mode appears  LSAC, LSIC, BNLA (via the Department of Social Services)
to be €1.5M but ramped up in design phases (€4.4M & €6.4M). This
may be an investment trend across ESFRI projects (front loaded during
these phases). Investments in cross-cutting program SERISS (ESS,
SHARE, CESSDA, GGP, EVS) are designed to advance interoperability,
comparative research and support for big data research.
Survey of Health,
Pan-national cooperation around survey methods and data col ection
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
Ageing and Retirement
of ageing populations in Europe. Notable growth in partners
data hub to provide national focus for identifying and facilitating
in Europe (SHARE)
participating in surveys from 2011 onward and a jump in 2017.
access to government datasets for research.

Support for cross-cutting infrastructure - SERISS (and alignment with
Australian comparators include: Longitudinal datasets e.g. ALSA
work undertaken in ESS and CESSDA) and DASISH (another cross-
(Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing)
cutting infrastructure). Cross-cutting program SERISS (ESS, SHARE,
CESSDA, GGP, EVS) to advance interoperability, comparative research
and support for big data research.
Common Language
Enables advanced analytics and new types of services and technologies.  Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity, data
Resources and
Links between heritage and language infrastructures, and new
hub, digitsation capability, digital HASS peak capability.
Technology
industries.
Australian comparators include:
Infrastructure (CLARIN)  Digitisation is a ‘knowledge centre’ in the CLARIN network – MoU with  Alveo virtual laboratory, Australian National Corpus, PARADISEC,

LIBER on digital col ections (with DARIAH).
Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, AIATSIS
Has not maximised user uptake and community engagement in design
Col ections.
of data infrastructure.
Updates to Trove recently with AUSTLANG vocabulary (partnership
with AIATSIS).
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Centre certification process to identify useful pathways for
infrastructure maturity, investment, growth and scaling up and cost-
benefit for participation in CLARIN network.
Move to blend CLARIN/DARIAH in Germany as per Netherlands as a
CLARIAH.
Digital Research
National approach to boosting support for arts and humanities in
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity,
Infrastructure for the
regional network (member and partner organisations). Community
digitsation capability, digital HASS peak capability.
Arts and Humanities
building and coordination (ground up first).
Australian comparators include: Institutional infrastructures arising
(DARIAH)
Longer time to get DARIAH operational (may indicate a need to build
from LIEF investment e.g. AusStage, AustLit, AustLI , Design and Art

community capability and capacity al  in paral el). By comparison
Australia Online.
language institutes established earlier and CLARIN became operational
quickly (with potential y more data and technology capability in the
research system).
Strong col aborations built with digitisation.eu and MoU arrangements
with LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries).
Consortium of
Early and tight coupling with national statistics bodies and university
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
European Social Science  data archives. Comprehensive coverage of research data and tool
data hub to provide national focus for identifying and facilitating
Data Archives (CESSDA)   requirements over time.
access to government datasets for research.

Consortia approach for longitudinal, demographic data and data
Australian comparators include:
linkage of benefit for government, higher education and industry.
Australian Data Archive (an institutional service, that delivers
Col aboration around discovery of social science data with government,  national services).
e.g. Denmark cross-ministry support (culture and higher education and
research) for data discoverability and access. Early linkages with
national statistics bodies and university data archives.
CESSDA 2018-2022 strategy indicates a push to global partnerships and
to find "third parties" e.g. with ICSPR (USA) and Research Data Alliance.
Emphasis on the breadth and depth (50 years) of experience. Cross
over of CESSDA with other infrastructure projects e.g. SSHOC & SERISS;
Collaboration within ERICs across domain boundaries e.g. Social
Sciences and Humanities cluster; Bundling of CESSDA, ESS, SHARE
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together as PROGEDO at national level; Cross-cutting program SERISS
(ESS, SHARE, CESSDA, GGP, EVS) to advance interoperability,
comparative research and support for big data research.
SAIL Databank
Secure access to demographic, health, social and education data from
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and

the resident population of Wales. Data Linkage services. Supports
data hub.
medical and health research primarily. Could be re-usable for HASS
Australian comparators include:
research. Identifies Canada (Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care)
Population Health Research Network (NCRIS).
and Australia (PHRN) as global equivalents for data linkage.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS Datalab remote or onsite).
Has a successful trajectory of combined infrastructure services (data
linkage, a safe haven databank, tools) and national networks to support  Bioplatforms Australia (NCRIS).
local, national and international collaborations. Movement from pilot
Australian Data Archive (ANU)
stage (and design) to establish a shared national facility with formal
National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (ANU)
partnerships with access controls, that serves local and national
research infrastructure requirements (whether that approach could be
generalised and used to meet the needs of research to access to
indigenous heritage and research data in government and higher
education col ections).
IMPACT Centre of
The alignment of resources, expertise and technology (around
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
Competence
digitisation of text and language-based heritage resources) and the link  digitisation capability.

to research, and expertise around text and language-based heritage
Australian comparators include:
resources (the alignment of the investments in IMPACT - for heritage
Major cultural institutions (e.g. National Library of Australia, State
and in CLARIN - for research).
Libraries), science and research institutions (e.g. CSIRO, University
Is a node of CLARIN (as a knowledge centre) also serves as a centre of
of Sydney and Melbourne) have digitisation facilities
competence for the heritage community to become a member of and

build up a network of members and partners.  Notably both heritage
and higher education institutions are members of IMPACT to gain the
benefits of a centre of competence.
Exemplar of alignment of investments in digitisation to meet the needs
of European cultural and society and to meet the needs of research
(access to heritage data), and the capacity to leverage col aborative
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networks and consolidate investments (for both sectors and
institutional members).
Europeana
World leading in the advancement of cultural heritage interoperability.  Informing potential Australian priorities: digitisation capability and

Aggregates using standards from diverse heritage organisations (and
digital HASS peak capability.
approaches to informatics) and uses linked open data practices to
Australian comparators include:
support data enhancement and richer semantic discovery. Community  Trove Australia (provided by the National Library of Australia, with
engagement through partnerships with research infrastructure
a contributor holdings from 1000 libraries and 300 organisations
programs e.g. DARIAH and Time Machine.
with heritage col ections.
Approaches to digitisation: advantages of EU funding, establishing
economies of scale, and standards and quality chal enges.
HathiTrust
Text and data mining infrastructure arising through consortia, to meet
Informing potential Australian priorities: digitisation capability and

a common research infrastructure requirement (across domains) for
digital HASS peak capability.
scholarly discovery phase (literature reviews), digital humanities,
Australian comparators include:
library and information science and computer science.
Trove Australia (provided by the National Library of Australia)
Capacity for digitisation, text and data mining services to be shared
Digitisation partnership.
across academic libraries.
Established HaithiTrust Research Center to enable computational
analysis and help meet the technical chal enges researchers face when
dealing with massive amounts of digital text.
First Nations
Membership comprises First Nation organisations with a focus on
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
Information
health and wel being.
Indigenous Data Framework.
Governance Centre
Provides services across government, higher education, industry, and
Australian comparators include:

community.
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey
Focused surveys and data capture for a range of health and wellbeing
(NATSIHS), National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social
objectives where they impact on First Nations peoples in Canada.
Survey (NATSISS), National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (NATSINPAS), Australian
Funding at national level for surveys by Health Canada, and Indigenous  Bureau of Statistics. Mayi Kuwayu Survey (National Study of
and Northern Affairs Canada, and Employment and Social Development  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wel being).
Canada.
National Indigenous Languages Survey, Australian Institute of
The integration of Indigenous knowledge in the research system is part  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
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of the Canadian science and technology plan (2020-25).
Other organisations involved: National Aboriginal Community
Control ed Health Organisation (NACCHO), Australian Institute of
Health and Welfare (AIHW), Departments of Social Services
(HILDA).
Cohort and Longitudinal  Institutional centres and partnerships with universities, British Library
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
Studies Enhancement
and UK Data Service.
data hub to provide national focus for identifying and facilitating
Resources (CLOSER)
Has evolved out of established survey mechanisms and data col ection
access to government datasets for research.

to a centre of competence as a hub in the research network and linking  Australian comparators include:
to other key stakeholders outside of higher education. CLOSER is
National Centre for Longitudinal Data (NCLD), Department of Social
embedded in the university context whereas in Australia, the National
Services.
Centre for Longitudinal Data (NCLD) operates out of the Department of  Australian Data Archive.
Social Services, this shifts the way the infrastructure is coordinated,
Australian Bureau of Statistics.
and data can be made accessible for research
Te Mana Raraunga -
Ensures data for and about Maori can be safeguarded and protected.
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity and
Māori Data Sovereignty  Advocates for Maori involvement in the governance of data
Indigenous Data Framework.
Network
repositories. Supports the development of Maori data infrastructure.
Australian comparators include:

Strategic digitisation agenda (in relation to Māori) is led by the National  Maiam nayri Wingara (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data
Library of New Zealand and Archives New Zealand, in partnership with
Sovereignty Col ective), Indigenous Data Network (University of
the Ministry for Culture and Heritage (Internal Affairs).
Melbourne)
Issues in common with Australia is the lack of Indigenous input and
oversight into the use of administrative data and integration of cultural
and privacy concerns.
Compute Canada
Specific support for humanities and social sciences built into existing
Informing potential Australian priorities: coordinating entity for

national computational services.
HASS to enable access and support to existing NCRIS facilities.
Progress on national HPC research infrastructure with publicly funded
Australian comparators include:
research organisations e.g. Statistics Canada. Working relationship
Not yet an Australian equivalent (through e.g. NCI or Pawsey).
between Compute Canada and CARL (Canadian Association of Research
Libraries).
Mix of community building (INKE), HASS projects needing cloud based
research infrastructure versus HPC, and capability building (DHSI) as an
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indicators of growth in research uptake. Gap between higher education
and government in the enabling of advanced research and the
provision of national research infrastructure.
European Research
In pre-operational phase. Designed for trans-disiplinary and
Informing potential Australian priorities: digitisation capability and
Infrastructure for
interdisciplnary use.
digital HASS peak capability.
Heritage Science (E-
Aims to deliver integrated access to expertise, data and technologies
Australian comparators include:
RIHS)
through four platforms to support heritage science: ARCHLAB (physical  NCRIS Synchrotron (Melbourne) and National Imaging Facility

col ections), DIGILAB (digital tools and FAIR data), FIXLAB (material
(Brisbane). ARC funded scanning equipment: AustLi  and Australian
science tools), MOBLAB (mobile digital tools).
Policy Observatory). Facilities in major cultural heritage institutions
Problem addressing: A need to address data infrastructure and the
(e.g. National Library digitisation) and equipment in universities
enabling language and image processing technologies and techniques
(e.g. ANU CT Lab and University of Melbourne Digitisation Centre)
(standardisation) across the range of disciplines in humanities and arts
and scientific organisations with heritage col ections (e.g. CSIRO
(and the range of heritage col ection types).
and Geoscience Australia).
Fragmentation in infrastructure investment has been identified as an
area to address in humanities, arts and heritage. Two H2020 programs:
PARTHENOS (cross-cutting to improve data practices across programs);
and E-RIHS-PP (ESFRI), reference the need for stronger coordination.
Both infrastructures combine training, virtual environments,
standardisation, community building; leveraging of a range of data,
technologies, and techniques. PARTHENOS appears to focus on FAIR
data and standardisation of research workflows for humanities
research, as an improvement exercise across infrastructures, whereas
E-RIHS is focused on al  disciplinary dimensions of heritage sciences and
global leadership.
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2.6    Opportunities for collaboration
Opportunities exist for information and expertise sharing, competency benchmarking, and
formal linkages with international infrastructure. Potential opportunities identified through
this project are listed in the following table alongside Australian comparators (NCRIS,
national or institutional).
Table 5: Opportunities for global col aboration
AU Comparators
Potential Global
Opportunity
Partner
Alveo virtual laboratory, Australian National
Common Language  Affiliation: "third party" status to
Corpus, PARADISEC, Centre of Excellence for  Resources and
connect into global research linkages
the Dynamics of Language. AIATSIS
Technology
with Europe, USA and South Africa.
Col ections.
Infrastructure
(CLARIN)
Institutional infrastructures arising from LIEF  Digital Research
Affiliation: “third party” status to
investment e.g. AusStage, AustLit, AustLII,
Infrastructure for
connect into global research linkages
Design and Art Australia Online.
the Arts and
with Europe and USA.
Humanities
(DARIAH)
Australian Data Archive (an institutional
Consortium of
Affiliation: participate in a global
service, that delivers national services) .
European Social
community of practice. Leverage
Science Data
specialised sensitive data
Archives (CESSDA)
technologies.
Longitudinal datasets e.g. HILDA, LSAC, LSIC,  European Social
Affiliation: connect into global
BNLA (via the Department of Social Services)  Survey (ESS)
research linkages with Asia, South
Africa, USA, Latin America.
As above: longitudinal datasets.
Survey of Health,
Affiliation: connect into global
Ageing and
research linkages with Asia, USA,
Retirement in
Latin America, and Israel.
Europe (SHARE)
Major cultural institutions (e.g. National
IMPACT Centre of
Membership: participate in
Library of Australia, State Libraries), science
Competence
community of practice.
and research institutions (e.g. CSIRO,
Leverage specialised language
University of Sydney and Melbourne) have
technologies and corpora or lexicon.
digitisation facilities.

NCRIS Synchrotron (Melbourne) and
European Research  Partnership: participate in
National Imaging Facility (Brisbane). ARC
Infrastructure for
community of practice and connect
funded scanning equipment: AustLi  and
Heritage Science (E- into global research linkages with
Australian Policy Observatory).  Facilities in
RIHS)
Europe, Israel, USA, Latin America.
major cultural heritage institutions (e.g.
National Library digitisation) and equipment
in universities (e.g. ANU CT Lab and
University of Melbourne Digitisation Centre)
and scientific organisations with heritage
col ections (e.g. CSIRO and Geoscience
Australia).

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[ 30 ]

Trove Australia (provided by the National
Europeana
Partnership: leverage existing global
Library of Australia, with a contributor
community of practice with Europe,
holdings from 1000 libraries and 300
USA and New Zealand.
organisations with heritage col ections.
Maiam nayri Wingara (Aboriginal and Torres  Te Mana Raraunga -  Leadership: establish global
Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Col ective),
Māori Data
community of practice and connect
Indigenous Data Network (University of
Sovereignty
into research linkages with Canada
Melbourne)
Network
and New Zealand.
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander  First Nations
Leadership: establish global
Health Survey (NATSIHS), National Aboriginal  Information
community of practice and connect
and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey
Governance Centre  into research linkages with Canada
(NATSISS), National Aboriginal and Torres
and New Zealand.
Strait Islander Nutrition and Physical Activity
Survey (NATSINPAS), Australian Bureau of
Statistics. Mayi Kuwayu Survey (National
Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Wel being).
National Indigenous Languages Survey,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
Other organisations involved: National
Aboriginal Community Control ed Health
Organisation (NACCHO), Australian Institute
of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Departments
of Social Services (HILDA).
Population Health Research Network
SAIL Databank
Partnership: broaden out
(NCRIS).
engagement around data linkage
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS Datalab
community of practice and connect
remote or onsite).
into research linkages in UK, Europe,
Canada beyond population health
Bioplatforms Australia (NCRIS).
and into social sciences.
Australian Data Archive (ANU)
National Centre for Indigenous Genomics
(ANU)
National Centre for Longitudinal Data
Cohort and
Affiliation: leverage existing global
(NCLD), Department of Social Services.
Longitudinal
community of practice and connect
Australian Data Archive.
Studies
into research linkages in UK and
Enhancement
Europe.
Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Resources (CLOSER)
Trove digitisation partnership (National
HathiTrust
Affliation: leverage existing global
Library of Australia).
community of practice in USA.

In the social sciences, it is worth exploring in more detail CESSDA, ESS and SHARE; and
for language-oriented humanities research, CLARIN. These three EU programs have
strengths in data infrastructure and expertise, communities of practice, and their technologies
are potentially portable into the Australian setting. The longitudinal surveying infrastructures
i.e. SHARE and ESS also may have portable technologies.
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Regarding wider humanities and arts research DARIAH is an obvious candidate, based on the
strength of their communities of practice and their role the emerging ERIC E-RIHS. In
addition to this, CESSDA, ESS, SHARE, DARIAH and CLARIN are all participants in the
Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) development (part of the European
Open Science Cloud).
2.7    Models for further analysis for HASS scoping
In terms of models for further analysis, potentially as part of the scoping exercise to aid with
addressing gaps in Australian national research infrastructure, it would be fruitful to
investigate seven infrastructures further (Table 6): IMPACT, Europeana, SAIL, CLOSER,
HathiTrust, CLARIAH and ODESSEI to understand the kind of research being enabled with
a range of infrastructure types and capabilities. IMPACT and Europeana represent
decentralised data collections, and SAIL, CLOSER, and HathiTrust represent centralised data
collections. CLARIAH and ODESSEI build on pre-existing research infrastructure and
consortia.
Table 6: Models for further analysis
Infrastructure  Trends
Further Analysis Areas
IMPACT
Specialisation of digitisation technologies based on
Connection between Europeana
heritage object types and contexts, i.e. IMPACT (text)
(as a pan-national broker) and
versus 3D (objects) and heritage institution type.
other leading heritage institutions
An alignment of investments in digitisation to meet
in orientation to research for
the needs of society and research (access to heritage
expertise and to delivery heritage
data), and capacity to leverage collaborative networks  data (for research reuse).
and consolidate investments.

An alignment of heritage and research resources,
expertise and technology – around text and language-
based heritage resources, IMPACT and CLARIN.
Europeana
Co-investment compared to EU contribution has three  Examine Framework funding for
modes: none, 1/4 or 1/2 of the funds co-contributed
humanities and arts against the
to the budget. This may indicate investment for
funding for Europeana to
national outcomes. Where the co-investment is
ascertain any crossover. Does this
negligible this may indicate cross-cutting interests
impact the availability of digital
with a pan-national outcome.
material (supply) for research
reuse?.
Sail Databank  Clustered infrastructures data, expertise, tools,
Movement from pilot stage to
compute operates as a highly effective means to
establish a shared national facility
attract research grants and establish local, national
with formal partnerships with
and global networks.
access controls, that serves local
Building diverse data processing techniques into
and national research
platform and suite of services to support medical and
infrastructure requirements. Can
health research. Are the tools and techniques to
this approach be generalised and
extract domain specific data from unstructured text
used to meet the needs of
and characterisation tools and techniques for image
research to access to Indigenous
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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

data generalisable and reusable for HASS research?
heritage and research data in
A successful trajectory of combined infrastructure
government and higher education
services (data linkage, a safe haven databank, tools)
col ections?
and national networks to support local, national and
international collaborations.
CLOSER
Evolution of research infrastructure out of establishing  How CLOSER liaises with the
survey mechanisms and data col ection to a centre of
Australian DSS and ABS
competence as a hub in the research network and
equivalents in the UK, to
linking to key stakeholders outside of higher
ascertain what network links are
education.
established and collaborations
CLOSER is embedded in the university context
enabled.
whereas National Centre for Longitudinal Data (NCLD)
operates out of the Department of Social Services, this
shifts the way the infrastructure is coordinated, and
how data can be made accessible for research.
HathiTrust
Text and data mining infrastructure arising through
What role has computer science
consortia, to meet a common research infrastructure
played in large complex
requirement (across domains) for scholarly discovery
unstructured and structured data
phase (literature reviews), digital humanities, library
architectures for humanities?
and information science and computer science.
What research needs drove the
Capacity for digitisation, text and data mining services  delivery of digital library material
to be shared across academic libraries, e.g. CADRE,
as datasets for research. What
California Digital Library.
factors relating to industry
HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Col aborative
partnership and copyright have
Support Program is used as a means of addressing
constrained data accessibility (for
computational analysis chal enges of the corpus.
research).
CLARIAH
CLARIAH consolidates existing infrastructure
Australia’s opportunity to
around language based research in HASS in the
achieve the right clustering,
Netherlands and leverages research technologies
cooperation and coordination
already developed. Provides coordination platform
from the outset of HASS NRI
and expertise in common infrastucture
planning. Achieving
development, interoperability, as well as domain
interoperability with
informatics. CLARIAH community of practice has
international infrastructure to
broadened to include more universities and
link Australian-based records
heritage and public institutions, including
with the world is major area
parliament and university libraries as partners.
for further investigation

ODISSEI
ODISSEI builds upon a preexisting consortium of
Achieving sustainability for social
multiple research organisations from across the
sciences infrstructure. How the
university and public sector. The major aim of that
‘open data infrastructure’ model
consortium (and ODESSEI) is to increase infrastructure  has enabled researchers to
system efficiencies (reduce fragmentation and
answer new, cross-disciplinary
overlap) and coordinate effort.
research questions or investigate
existing questions in new ways.
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2.8    Conclusion
In Australia there is an opportunity to align the development of HASS NRI with the 2016
Roadmap and with key policy agendas for digital infrastructure, data sharing and
citizen/consumer data rights.
International investments in HASS research infrastructure have shown pathways for
infrastructure investment in:
>  heritage research, data and technologies – building capabilities in characterisation
technology and pattern recognition;
>  language research, data and technologies – building capabilities in informatics,
semantics and AI; and
>  social research, data and technologies – building capabilities in internet of things,
civic technologies and precision services.
In general, the ‘use-value’ for Australia from these programs are in the following areas:
>  Identifying known ‘good’ (and known ‘bad’) approaches to establishing research
infrastructures in HASS, which can be integrated with the existing Australia programs
of collaborative infrastructure (e.g. Australian Research Data Commons – ARDC) and
evolved from institutional capacity (e.g. Australian Data Archive – ADA).
>  Gaining access to technical expertise and frameworks that benefit from global
adoption (e.g. IMPACT for digitisation).
>  Leveraging governance and funding (co-investment) models, some of which are at
large scale (e.g. European) which could be applied in an Australian context (e.g.
federated states in the case of government data, bring together research and collecting
institutions).
>  Avoiding duplication of effort in newer areas through partnering and sharing of best
practises, notably in indigenous research infrastructures and digital and data-intensive
humanities.
>  Where new types of HASS research are to be enabled, this requires looking closely at
where data needs to be unlocked, coordinated, and curated at much larger scales in
new data sourcing arrangements and co-developed infrastructure partnerships with
government organisations or industry.

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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

3  Gap Analysis
3.1  Introduction
In contrast to the countries and regions surveyed for this study, there are no nationally
comparable HASS research infrastructures in Australia, nor a national domain-focused
capability to support computationally transformative HASS research. This represents a
significant gap in Australia’s national research capacity relative to other countries.
In Australia, existing HASS infrastructures are largely operating at an institutional or project-
based level, and the state of play may be characterised as uncoordinated. Existing platforms
separately work to standardise, harmonise and provide single points of access to data. There
is not a combined set of tools to power innovation in the way researchers analyse combined
datasets, and support for new research methodologies. Australia does not have a coordinated
HASS NRI system which can connect data hubs, facilities and the wider research enabling
ecosystem, including NCRIS funded entities and centres of excellence.
No other nations examined for this project explicitly highlight research into Indigenous
health, wellbeing and culture as a national priority or key enabling feature of their large-scale
research infrastructure. This is a gap in the international landscape that Australia could seek
to lead and fill.
An opportunity exists for Australia to take a significant regional leadership or partnership
role in a potential Indo-Pacific wide approach to research infrastructure.
3.2  The Australian landscape
Patterns in the Australian landscape look like the pre-stimulus phase in Europe in which
Framework Program funding seeded key HASS strengths. Australia has made some
investments via ANDS/NeCTAR/RDS and through the Australian Research Council’s
Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities scheme into institutional infrastructure and
is in a good position to take advantage of strategic NRI investment.
Over a twenty-year period and particularly over the last decade, national systems within
Europe have achieved transformations in HASS research, generating new skills, industries,
and technology. In a country the size of Australia, with a federated system, we can take
lessons from European investments in particular, which have now moved into a period of
consolidation, at domain level (e.g. the collaborative agenda for CLARIN and DARIAH –
(CLARIAH) and with underpinning infrastructures – the Social Sciences and Humanities
Open Cloud (SSHOC) development (which is part of the European Open Science Cloud).
The project mapped select research projects and programs in Australia against international
exemplars to identify areas of alignment and potential opportunity or collaboration (Table 7).
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[ 35 ]

Table 7: A closer look at Australian comparators
Infrastructure Name
Associated HASS Projects
AU Comparators
Consortium of European Social
See UK Data Archive Data Impact Blog and
Australian Data Archive (an institutional service, that delivers national
Science Data Archives (CESSDA)
Impact and Innovation Lab.
services)
European Social Survey (ESS)
See bibliography of publications based on ESS  Longitudinal datasets e.g. HILDA, LSAC, LSIC, BNLA (via the Department of
data.
Social Services)
Survey of Health, Ageing and
See publications based on SHARE data.
Longitudinal datasets e.g. ALSA (Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing).
Retirement in Europe (SHARE)
Compute Canada
Canadian Writing Research Col aboratory
--
Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge
IMPACT Centre of Competence
See CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Denmark –
Major cultural institutions (e.g. National Library of Australia, State Libraries),
(digitisation)
publications from the Dept of Nordic Studies
science and research institutions (e.g. CSIRO, University of Sydney and
and Linguistics (NorS)
Melbourne) have digitisation facilities. None specialise in language
technologies or provide corpora or lexicon.
E-RIHS
See scientific publications from IPERION-CH
NCRIS Synchrotron (Melbourne) and National Imaging Facility (Brisbane). ARC
(precursor to E-RIHS).
funded scanning equipment: AustLi  and Australian Policy Observatory).
Facilities in major cultural heritage institutions (e.g. National Library
digitisation) and equipment in universities (e.g. ANU CT Lab and University of
Melbourne Digitisation Centre) and scientific organisations with heritage
col ections (e.g. CSIRO and Geoscience Australia).
Europeana
Venice Time Machine , Naturalis Biodiversity
Trove Australia (National Library of Australia, with contributor holdings from
Center – Butterfly Species Identification,
1000 libraries and 300 organisations with heritage col ections.
Golden Agents, Life of Newspapers
CLARIN
See Danish node for peer reviewed papers
Alveo virtual laboratory, Australian National Corpus, PARADISEC, Centre of
and Swedish node for Til tal
Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. AIATSIS Col ections.
DARIAH
See CLARIAH (Netherlands node) for pilot
At an institutional level there are comparators arising from LIEF investment
research projects.
e.g. AusStage, AustLit, AustLII, DAAO, CoEDL.
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[ 36 ]

Te Mana Raraunga
See research activities.
Maiam nayri Wingara (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty
Col ective), Indigenous Data Network (University of Melbourne).
First Nations Information Governance  See publications.
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (NATSIHS),
Centre
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS),
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nutrition and Physical Activity
Survey (NATSINPAS), Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Mayi Kuwayu Survey (National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Wel being, National Indigenous Languages Survey, Australian Institute of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
Other organisations involved: National Aboriginal Community Control ed
Health Organisation (NACCHO), Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
(AIHW), Departments of Social Services (HILDA).
SAIL Databank
See uses for SAIL data and projects using SAIL
Australia Population Health Research Network (NCRIS), Australian Bureau of
data.
Statistics (ABS Datalab remote or onsite), Bioplatforms Australia, Australian
Data Archive (ANU), National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (ANU).
CLOSER
See blog for research news.
National Centre for Longitudinal Data (NCLD), Department of Social Services.
Longitudinal data is maintained by survey managers for HILDA, LSAY etc.
Longitudinal datasets are accessible for reuse from the Australian Data
Archive and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Education and training around longitudinal data analysis provided by the
Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc.
Commonwealth Accredited Integrating Authorities have expertise, advice
provided via the National Statistical Service on data integration.
HathiTrust
See HathiTrust Research Center Advanced
Trove Digitisation partnership. Large aggregation col ection APIs: Trove
Collaborative Support Projects awarded in
2019.
Access to corpora: Trove Australia; Tinker (Humanities, Arts and Social
Science Data Enhanced) & Alveo (Human and Communication Science)
Virtual Labs, ARDC funded.
Institutional col ection APIs: State Library of New South Wales, ACMI,
Museum Victoria, National Museum of Australia, State Library of Queensland

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[ 37 ]

3.3  Findings from the gap analysis
3.3.1.  Consolidation and leadership
The mapping survey highlighted a strong consolidation trend across the international HASS
research infrastructures initially established as small projects with a discipline focus, towards
larger facilities with a broader Humanities or Social Science focus, or indeed a ‘HASS wide’
focus.
This is particularly evident in Europe where the role of the EU as a regional facilitator and
catalyst ensures that a critical mass of expertise and resources from larger nations can enable
smaller nations to gain access to research infrastructures that they otherwise might have been
unable to sustain themselves.
Data curation expertise and skills and services play a significant role in the development of
national (and international) capability, which in turn underpins the integration of research
enabling capabilities, such as data mining, analysis (including text analysis), informatics,
modelling and visualisation for the HASS community.
This trend has led to increasingly sophisticated governance models being established to
support these consolidated research infrastructures exemplified by the European Research
Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), a specific legal structure that facilitates the establishment
and operation of Research Infrastructures with European interest (2009).
Funding models have evolved in parallel with these governance structures, often based on a
flat fee plus subscription (as a percentage of GDP) from participating nations. These co-
investment models are key to ensuring such research infrastructures are sustainable. Some
infrastructures, recognising the importance of broad participation, provide guidelines and
costs estimates to join, e.g. CLARIN.
3.3.2.  Systematic HASS research capacity
Many of the European HASS research infrastructures included in the mapping survey have
been developed through project and expansion funding to build upon institutional capabilities
in the first instance, and then on aligning and aggregating national capabilities.
This evolution extends back more than 15 years in the social science domains, and over a
decade in the arts and humanities domains. Significantly, these research infrastructures have
received central (EU) and/or co-contribution (national) funding over that entire period.
Building on existing research practises and peer networks, they are heavily oriented toward
improving existing data sets and research methods, particularly when complemented by
programs to raise awareness and augment researcher skills. At the European level, five of
these research infrastructures are considered landmark facilities (out of a total of 37).
Australia does not have any nationally comparable HASS research infrastructures, and this
represents a significant gap in national research capacity. Consequently, research data assets
currently enabling HASS research either do not exist in Australia, or are institutionally hosted
and uncoordinated, and largely not FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
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The mapping highlights that there are Australian comparators to many of the European
research infrastructures operating at an institutional level (such as ADA, the Pacific and
Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), and APO), or
as a project within a larger program or institution (Trove, or Household, Income and Labour
Dynamics in Australia (HILDA)) that are well placed to be evolved into national capabilities.
In Europe there have been two separate streams: humanities and arts, and social sciences.
Europe is now embarking on how these can be better connected, which is something
Australia has an opportunity to address from the outset. One of the major lessons from
Europe is that disconnection between investments has necessitated a later phase
‘harmonisation’ of research infrastructures, both within and across HASS. Harmonisation is
now a priority between the current ERIC infrastructures in the social sciences (European
Social Survey (ESS), Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)) and
humanities (CLARIN – European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and
Technology) and DARIAH – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) as
well as the ESFRI Landmark CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science data
Archives).
3.3.3.  Access to government data
Much of Australia’s public sector data is locked up and underutilised in HASS research, and
in other disciplines. It is clear from the mapping survey that in Europe many of the cross-
government jurisdiction challenges that are typical of the Australian federation have been
addressed through formal Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and EU incentives (fiscal
and regulatory). Significant effort has been invested in EU legislation to address data privacy
and data rights, which could usefully inform similar considerations in Australia, for example,
the broad General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Within our region, the New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) database is a world-
leading exemplar of a research infrastructure that value-adds government data for research. In
the context of the current Australian activities of the Office of the National Data
Commissioner and the recommendations of the Productivity Commissioner cited above, the
NZ IDI appears relevant.
3.3.4.  Transformative digital capability for humanities
In addition to the broad-based impact across the HASS sector of systemic infrastructure
improvement activities outlined above, the international mapping identifies the emergence of
new and unique HASS research infrastructures that are heavily data, information and
computer science enabled and provide different arrangements of data custody, new data and
large scales of data that lead to radically new research techniques.
The examples identified are mostly at the national scale with a focus on long timelines and
unlocking large scale cultural heritage datasets (e.g. UK, Netherlands, Demark, Sweden).
Although there are Australian research exemplars that demonstrate this capability (e.g.
Virtual Archaeology Unravels Historic Shipwreck Mystery (Pawsey, 2018)), there is no
national domain focussed capability to support computationally intensive HASS research of
this transformative nature.
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3.3.5.  Regional approach
National strategies and roadmaps for research infrastructure are primarily focussed on
providing national outcomes. Significantly, the mapping for this project reveals that these
national strategies also recognise the critical importance of participating in, and contributing
to, international and regional research infrastructures.
As noted above the regional consolidation and leadership role the EU plays is crucial in
bringing together the large community of disparate stakeholder countries and institutions
from across Europe to co-fund capabilities that deliver outcomes for all of Europe.
There are lessons here for Australia at a national scale where the Federal government has the
capacity to incentivise and catalyse a national federated approach to HASS research
infrastructure across the broad stakeholder community. Proven collaborative mechanisms
such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) are well suited
to such an opportunity.
At a larger scale, an opportunity exists for Australia to take a significant regional leadership
or partnership role in a potential Indo-Pacific wide approach to research infrastructure. This
might include, as it does in Europe, expertise and resources from larger nations enabling
smaller nations to gain access to research infrastructures that they otherwise might not have
been able to sustain themselves, as well as building stronger collaborative ties with HASS
research communities within larger nations. Australia’s close research links to New Zealand,
and New Zealand’s success with the IDI (for example), suggest such a program could be
readily initiated.
The mapping identifies an international leadership opportunity gap that could be addressed
through an investment focussed on Indigenous health, wellbeing and culture research, with
several other countries having a related interest in indigenous research (New Zealand,
Norway, Canada).Such an approach is also consistent with significant portions of Australia’s
HASS research interests as well as aligning strongly with Australia’s reconciliation agenda,
with Australia’s Pacific Step-Up and Australia’s broader geo-political interests as a ‘soft
power’ (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade).
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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES MAPPING REPORT

4  Potential Priorities
Potential priority areas for Australian HASS National Research Infrastructure (NRI)
development and international collaboration/partnership, are intended to address both the
gaps identified and the unique characteristics of the Australian NRI landscape.
The approach recognises that this work will include initiatives that are unique to the HASS
community and hence for which the HASS community needs to be primarily responsible, and
initiatives that are not unique to HASS, but which need to be guided by HASS and be HASS-
relevant.
In summary, Table 9 shows alignment between the international research infrastructures
mapped and the proposed programs.
Table 9: International research infrastructures mapped to Australian priorities

Coordinating
Data Hub
Digitisation
Peak
Indigenous

ESS



SHARE



CLARIN





DARIAH




CESSDA



SAIL



IMPACT



EUROPEANA



HathiTrust



FNIGC



CLOSER



MDSN



COMPUTE CA


R-RIHS


4.1  Australian HASS research infrastructure entity
Based on the lessons from the international mapping survey, one of the highest priorities for
Australian HASS national research infrastructure development and investment is the
establishment of an entity to create focus, clarify responsibility, maximise collaboration and
reduce complexity regarding HASS research infrastructures. This recommendation is a direct
response to the findings from the mapping exercise with regards the strong consolidation
trend across HASS infrastructures in Europe outlined above and is a means to avoid
fragmentation and duplication in the Australian system.
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Such an entity would lead requirements gathering and roadmap development, and coordinate,
facilitate and partner to deliver tools and systems to support HASS research.
This ‘focal point’ organisation, Australian HASS Research Infrastructure (AHRI; a working
title), will simplify the existing mesh of interactions across the national HASS research
stakeholder landscape and provide a national point of contact for international collaboration,
as indicated below.

FIG.2 A single entity, Australian HASS Research Infrastructure (AHRI) wil  create focus, clarify responsibility
and reduce complexity
AHRI is envisaged as having a mission and structure analogous to existing NCRIS
capabilities such as Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL) and BioPlatforms Australia (BPA).
A membership model that included both research and collecting institutions would be one
mechanism to support a co-investment partnership with the Commonwealth.
In addition to the leadership and coordination role AHRI would undertake programs to foster
the capacity and capabilities of the Australian HASS sector to boost its contribution to
Australia’s health, environmental, economic and social wellbeing. The specific goals of these
programs would be to:
>  Bridge the systemic HASS research infrastructure capacity gap through an awareness
and upskilling initiative.
>  Liaise with Federal and State government departments to ensure HASS-relevant
government datasets are made readily accessible to researchers.
>  Improve the consistency and coherence of access of digital data and physical objects
held by collecting institutions by formally engaging the collecting institutions as
partners in Australia’s national HASS research infrastructure. Collections will
continue to be maintained by the collecting institutions, but it will be the
responsibility of AHRI to deliver a layer of access and linkage capability across all
these collections to best serve the HASS community’s research needs by addressing
issues of HASS data sensitivity and access to government data.
>  Initiate work to identify humanities disciplines that would benefit from a peak HASS
‘compute+data’ capability to support transformative research methods (perhaps
related to Indigenous research).

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The following five programs are proposed to achieve these goals (described in more detail
below):
>  HASS Research Data Commons (HRDC)
>  Social Science Data Hub (SSDH)
>  Indigenous Data Framework (IDF)
>  National Digitisation Capability (NDC)
>  Digital HASS Peak Capability (DHPC).
4.2  HASS Research Data Commons
Deliver a HASS Research Data Commons (HRDC) leveraging the experience, expertise and
resources of relevant Australian programs (e.g. ARDC, Population Health Research Network
(PHRN), and AURIN), relevant HASS stakeholder institutions (e.g. collecting institutions,
institutional programs like the Australian Data Archive) and informed by and aligned with
international programs. This would be a ‘catch up exercise’ focussed on improving awareness
and expertise around some ‘minimally viable’ or ‘common denominator’ data commons tools
for researchers and related professional staff (e.g. librarians).
The critical success factor would be to do this quickly and deliver something for as many
HASS researchers as possible. The key elements might include the most common categories
and capabilities of the programs included in the mapping (Table 10).
Table 10: Most common categories and capabilities on research infrastructure identified in mapping
Infrastructure Categories
Infrastructure Capabilities
Capability Building
Data Curation
Community Building
Data Reuse
Information Services
Domain Expertise
Discovery Platform

Research Practises and Methods

Data Service

Research Tools and Platforms

4.3  Social Sciences and Languages Data Hub
Establish a social science and languages data hub (SSDH) to provide a national focus for
identifying and facilitating access to government datasets for research and the necessary tools
to support research with them. This will include addressing cross-jurisdictional
inconsistencies regarding data formats, access, open data policy, and working with ARDC’s
sensitive data program on issues related to Indigenous data sovereignty, providence, privacy,
etc. in partnership with, for example, PHRN and AURIN.
Social science research infrastructure, specifically longitudinal survey data, has been
operational for a longer period than for humanities and arts in Europe and in the UK.
Consequently, the global networks around this data infrastructure and associated tools and
skills, are more evolved. Three of the five Social and Cultural Innovation (SCI, or HASS)
landmark research infrastructures identified in the European Strategy Forum on Research
Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap (2018) are social science based – Consortium of European
Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA), European Social Survey (ESS) and Survey of
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Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Given the large number of countries
participating in these programs, some from outside Europe, the Australia SSDH should
strongly consider joining these programs at the European level, or some of the national
programs (e.g. UK’s Cohort and Longitudinal Studies Enhancement Resources (CLOSER).
The HASS community needs to lead the SSDH program in partnership with others.
4.4 Indigenous Data Framework
The 2016 Roadmap identifies a number of existing platforms that support research into
Indigenous health, social well-being, culture, language and history, noting that “creating a
cohesive platform that harvests information [data], that is interoperable and that provides
appropriate levels of accessibility for communities and researchers alike is required” (p.36).
The value of such a platform is well articulated in the Indigenous Data Network (IDN)
roadmap (2019):
Addressing the complex issues of disadvantage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people requires relevant high-quality data. Data provides the evidence-base for the
development, implementation and evaluation of effective policy solutions at local,
state/territory and national levels. As the Prime Minister’s 2019 Closing the Gap Report
emphasises, building an evidence base is key to success. However, the lack of reliable and
consistent data for Indigenous Australians results in a paucity of evidence-based Indigenous
policy-making (p.3).
The Indigenous Data Framework (IDF) program proposed would address barriers to realising
this opportunity, by aligning and integrating the challenges of Indigenous data sovereignty,
access and repatriation with related efforts to improve and facilitate access to sensitive
research data being undertaken by other national and international bodies (including in the
fields of health and medical research).
The HASS community needs to be a partner in the IDF program.
4.5 National Digitisation Capability
Digitisation as a national capability is not an explicit goal of most of the programs included in
the mapping but is an intrinsic requirement for many programs as it enables access to relevant
data sources including historic government records, heritage collections and clinical records.
It is recognised as a core capability for many of Australia’s collecting institutions including
the NFSA (Digitisation Strategy 2018-2015) and NLA (Digitisation, including through
Trove). Integrating and aligning these institutional programs to create a national HASS
research infrastructure capability is highlighted in the 2016 Roadmap (and 2011 Research
Infrastructure Roadmap).
This National Digitisation Capacity (NDC) would be well suited to the ‘distributed node’
model of research infrastructure, and one that can draw on and leverage international
programs, notably European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS).
The HASS community needs to be a lead in the NDC program.
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4.6  Digital HASS Peak Capability
The research techniques enabled by the integration of modern computation technologies such
as cloud computing and High-Performance Computing (HPC) with existing and newly
generated and created big data are already transforming research techniques across many
HASS disciplines.
This program would seek to extend and deepen the accessibility, usability and adoption of
computationally intense methods across the broader HASS research community in area such
as machine learning, artificial intelligence and text mining and analysis. The Digital HASS
Peak Capability (DHPC) would necessarily leverage big data and HPC facilitates and other
technology platform programs including NCI, Pawsey, and ARDC informed by similar
international programs such as those identified in the mapping.
Unlike the other potential programs, which seek to achieve international parity with other
national research infrastructures, one of the desired goals of the HASS Peak capability
program would be to identify a field of research of significance to Australia where these
techniques could be applied in a world-leading capacity. Further analysis is required to
identify the specific fields of research in Australian histories and cultures, or Indigenous
studies.
The HASS community needs to lead the Digital HASS Peak program.
4.7  Implementation
The table overleaf (Table 11) provides an assessment of the overall impact of the potential
priorities.
EXPLANATORY NOTES:
Complexity – Is the solution/approach well understood and can be wel  defined? Are there exemplars at national or supra-
national scale international y? Is there an existing body of expertise and experience in Australia that can be leveraged?
Note – timeline is addressed below.
Impact – ‘Overal ’ indicates scope of impact across al  stakeholders – is a proxy for the estimated size of the research
community that wil  directly benefit; ‘Researchers’ implicitly includes impact for research institutions; ‘Col ecting
Institutions’ includes public funded gal eries, libraries, archives and museums; ‘Governments’ include state and Federal
governments (policy) and agencies (service delivery).
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Table 11: Program assessment: cost, complexity, impact

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link to page 43 link to page 45

The proposed programs are expected to commence in a staggered manner over the next five
years with the objectives of delivering aggregate research impact over a decade within
available resources. An indicate view of this staged approach is shown in the figure below
(Fig.4). Note that the shading is suggestive of when greater intensity and progress may be
required, or where existing programs can be leveraged, e.g. the ARDC already has a program
of work underway regarding a HASS Research Data Commons.

FIG.4 Proposed timelines for staged investment

There is some overlap and mutually supportive interaction between these programs, as
highlighted in the table below (Table 12). Darker shading indicates a program directly
addresses an AHRI goal; lighter shading indicates the program supports a goal.
Table 12: Goals and Priorities

Goals

Systemic
Government
Integrating
Peak Digital
Program (Priority)
HASS Capacity
Data Access for Col ecting
HASS
HASS
Institutions
HASS Research Data Commons

Social Science and Languages Data Hub

Indigenous Data Framework

National Digitisation Capability

Digital HASS Peak Capability

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Appendix A – Research phases
The research undertaken for this project was essentially desktop in design. The project did
not have a mandate to undertake consultation with the HASS sector in Australia.
An Advisory Group was established to provide advice on international models and to guide
the gap analysis. The breadth of expertise of the group spans key stakeholder communities –
HASS research, Indigenous research, the cultural and collecting sector, and universities. The
Advisory Group provided feedback at each stage of the research and on the final report.
Based on advice from the Advisory Group the project focused on select international models
or exemplars. The analysis in this report is primarily informed by a detailed mapping of
research infrastructures in Europe, the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Canada and New Zealand.
The key phases of research and focus questions were as follows:
1. MAPPING
Identify and map key international infrastructures in the HASS domain at national and pan national scale.
This phase of work addressed the fol owing questions:
1.  What international examples can Australia learn from?
2.  How do they operate?
3.  Are there international best practice models?
The mapping produced a database of international and pan national HASS infrastructure categorised
according to type, scale, funding, costs, organisational/governance structure, communities of users. Where
possible the project was able to draw out some data on levels of internationalisation, outputs, impact and
sustainability.
2. GAP ANALYSIS
Identify gaps in Australian HASS infrastructure as informed by the analysis of the mapping of international
models. This phase of work addressed the fol owing questions:
4.  Are there international exemplars which could apply or be adapted to Australian HASS NRI
development?
5.  What are the conditions required for Australia to operate similar models to those international
exemplars?
The gap analysis drew on the project’s Advisory Group for its:
>  Evaluation framework for assessing international HASS infrastructures and use-value for Australia.
>  Analysis of the gaps in RI in Australia vs international.
>  Identification of potential priorities and areas of focus, such as digitisation, international
interoperability and access and data management infrastructures.
3.  OPPORTUNITIES
The final report to inform consideration of research infrastructure investment and delivery for HASS NRI in
Australia, includes an analysis of lessons and opportunities from international HASS research infrastructure
investments, a list of potential areas of cooperation/col aboration and options for HASS NRI into the
future, and identifies where further work needs to be undertaken.

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Appendix B: HASS Research
Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) research enhances understanding about
Australia, the Australian people, and Australia’s place in the world.
More broadly, HASS research provides new frameworks for the analysis of people in the
world and the products and outcomes of human activity. The disciplines that make up the
HASS sector are fundamental to the development of a knowledge-based economy and in
developing inter-disciplinary solutions to a broad range of complex problems and issues such
as climate change, social cohesion, the impact and relevance of technological development,
future workforce solutions, resource management, health and welfare.
The humanities investigate how people experience, understand and describe the world and
their place in it. The humanities examine human cultures, values and beliefs (Australian
Academy of the Humanities. 2019). The social sciences work on the systematic development
of logic and evidence to understand human behaviour in its social setting, including the
nature of economic, political, and community activity and institutions (Academy of the Social
Sciences in Australia, 2019).
HASS comprises more than 50
disciplines at the granular four-
digit) field of research level
(Fig.1) (Appendix A).
Australian HASS researchers
comprise 41 per cent (16,488
FTE) of the university-based
system, based on the latest
Excellence in Research Australia
(ERA) audit (Australian Research
Council, 2019).

FIG.1 HASS FIELDS OF RESEARCH
SOURCE: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2008), ANZSRC Fields of Research.
HASS research is undertaken at every university in Australia, and HASS is responsible for
teaching 61 percent (606,721 students) of the university population in Australia (derived from
Department of Education higher education statistics collection, where humanities, arts and
social sciences (HASS) comprises, at the broad Field of Education level 12 to 22).

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Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) fields of research, two- and four-digit level
Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences (SBE)
Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA)
13 EDUCATION
12 BUILT ENVIRONMENT AND DESIGN
1301 Education Systems
1201 Architecture
1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy
1202 Building
1303 Specialist Studies in Education
1203 Design Practice and Management
1399 Other Education
1204 Engineering Design
14 ECONOMICS
1205 Urban and Regional Planning
1401 Economic Theory
1299 Other Built Environment and Design
1402 Applied Economics
18 LAW AND LEGAL STUDIES
1403 Econometrics
1801 Law
1499 Other Economics
1802 Maori Law
15 COMMERCE, MANAGEMENT, TOURISM AND SERVICES
1899 Other Law and Legal Studies
1501 Accounting, Auditing and Accountability
19 STUDIES IN CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING
1502 Banking, Finance and Investment
1901 Art Theory and Criticism
1503 Business and Management
1902 Film, Television and Digital Media
1504 Commercial Services
1903 Journalism and Professional Writing
1505 Marketing
1904 Performing Arts and Creative Writing
1506 Tourism
1905 Visual Arts and Crafts
1507 Transportation and Freight Services
1999 Other Studies in Creative Arts and Writing
1599 Other Commerce, Management, Tourism and
20 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE
Services
2001 Communication and Media Studies
16 STUDIES IN HUMAN SOCIETY
2002 Cultural Studies
1601 Anthropology
2003 Language Studies
1602 Criminology
2004 Linguistics
1603 Demography
2005 Literary Studies
1604 Human Geography
2099 Other Language, Communication and Culture
1605 Policy and Administration
21 HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
1606 Political Science
2101 Archaeology
1607 Social Work
2102 Curatorial and Related Studies
1608 Sociology
2103 Historical Studies
1699 Other Studies in Human Society
2199 Other History and Archaeology
17 PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES
22 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES
1701 Psychology
2201 Applied Ethics
1702 Cognitive Science
2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
2203 Philosophy
1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
2204 Religion and Religious Studies
2299 Other Philosophy and Religious Studies
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2008) ‘Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)’, cat.
no. 297.0. Available from
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/4AE1B46AE2048A28CA25741800044242?opendocument

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Appendix C: HASS Data
HASS Research Infrastructures
Research infrastructures in HASS comprise:
>  Physical collections (including artefacts and larger physical structures such as
archaeological sites) and their storage facilities
>  Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (including both physical objects and
digital artefacts)
>  Digital infrastructure (including digital record creation, digital data storage and tool
sets)
>  Laboratory facilities for heritage science and archaeology
>  Infrastructures for data collection, services, linkage and analysis, such as public
statistics and longitudinal surveys. Data collection may span topic areas such as
election studies, involve long-term multi-generational population studies and surveys,
and more recently social media data
The assemblages of data – data files, datasets, databases and data streams – collected,
generated and curated by these infrastructures have all the characteristics of ‘big data’ in that
their volume, their variety and the velocity of their creation pose severe challenges for many
conventional analytical and computational methods. As a result, HASS research
infrastructures, both internationally and in Australia, are increasingly focused on equipping
HASS researchers with the tools and techniques to take on these challenges.

Government data
The Australian HASS community, like other research communities, makes extensive use of
data held by federal and state agencies, including Departments of Health, Departments of
Education, Departments of Social Services, Departments of Innovation and Industry, the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and many
others. There are significant challenges in achieving effective and consistent access to data
across all jurisdictions of Australia’s federation, that are not unique to the HASS sector, as
identified by the Productivity Commission’s report into Data Availability and Use (2017):
Governments across Australia hold enormous amounts of data, but mostly lag behind other
comparable economies in beneficially using data beyond the purposes for which it was
initially collected, or allowing others access to do so (p.24).
The Government’s response proposed reforms to:
… empower Australian citizens, governments, industries and researchers to use and share
data, while maintaining the strict privacy, security and transparency safeguards essential to
maintain trust in the system.
With the following goal:
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These advances to Australia’s data system will mean we can harness the power of data to
drive innovation and opportunity for the Australian economy (p.1).
The HASS research sector is fundamental to realising this goal through the development of a
social license to use data consistent with current activities with the Office of the National
Data Commissioner and the Data Sharing and Release reforms. Using mechanisms like the
EU Responsible Research and Innovation Toolkit (which helps to “align … research and
innovation processes to societal needs and challenges” (Responsible Research and Innovation
Project, n.d)) alongside the Five-Safes Framework (“a multi-dimensional approach to
managing disclosure risk” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017)) will provide a way to
secure and maintain the social license, which will be fundamental to using integrated data for
research.

Indigenous data
Improving the lived experience of Australia’s first nations peoples requires that data is made
accessible for research. Advancing cultural connection and social cohesion of Australians and
the wider Indo-Pacific region and globally requires data access and sharing, and services and
processing tools that are co-located. Improving social and economic outcomes for Australians
will be underwritten by the quality of data and data linkage that will bring together
longitudinal social survey data with health and environmental data.
Research related to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Indigenous
research) faces challenges relating to data sovereignty and access.
Indigenous data needs a variety of community consent and access controls to allow
Indigenous communities to access and selectively and safely release their data to individual
researchers. A similar process also allows digitised materials to be repatriated to Indigenous
communities.
Responses to the 2016 Roadmap, from a range of stakeholders, emphasised the need for
Indigenous leaders and organisations to be at the heart of determining capabilities required to
support Indigenous aspirations and needs. Indigenous co-participation will be essential in any
project involving Indigenous communities directly and consideration given to cultural
sensitivities and associated rights.
Several organisations in Australia are working on Indigenous data governance and access
policies and strategies, including the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the Indigenous Data Network (based at the University of
Melbourne), and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consortium.

Collecting institutions
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs), the collecting institutions, are
therefore important stakeholders in Australian national HASS research infrastructure,
particularly those that are federally funded with an explicit national collection mandate, e.g.
National Library of Australia (NLA), National Archives of Australia (NAA), National
Museum of Australia (NMA), and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).
HASS researchers rely heavily and opportunistically upon the digitisation and digital access
agendas of these public sector institutions. The value of these digital services is highlighted
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by, for example, the frequent reference by individual researchers and bodies within the HASS
sector to the usefulness and importance of the Trove service provided by the NLA.
Although nationally funded collecting institutions typically have a national mandate to
collect, it is not for the sole purpose of supporting research, as the ‘mission to share’ is only a
portion of their typical Collect-Preserve-Share charter. Consequently, a key aspect of the
relationship between the HASS research community and the collecting and cultural
institutions is that there is a high level of interdependent value. Research infrastructures that
improve access to objects within collections facilitates research that creates new knowledge
and data that can be attached to the objects. This process improves the collection, enables the
linking of data and objects between collections and improves the value of the collection to the
public.
Existing programs that operate across many collecting institutions in support of their
activities enable and facilitate access to collections for researchers, and hence can also be
considered components of national research infrastructure, e.g. the National eDeposit system
is a national system operating across nine jurisdictions (and related legislation, accounting
standards, Crown Solicitors, collecting and description policies).

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Document Outline